Surprise!

Aging doesn’t come with instructions. It is an abstraction, a distant star, a speck on the horizon, invisible, incomprehensible. It is a tunnel we all travel through, and we never know when the journey will begin.

In my 20s and 30s, I viewed aging as a spiritual experience. An evolution. An opportunity for self-improvement. In my 40s, aging turned physical. My body slowed, no matter how fast I willed it to move. Fatigue became familiar. My feet ached with the day's first steps. I needed orthotics, and a new hip.

But I was insistent. There was no pain that a daily swim or a good sweat on the elliptical trainer wouldn’t cure. Serious aging, I maintained, would announce itself when I retired, which simply wasn't on my calendar. Problem solved.

Then I turned 54.

It’s not just the second arthritic hip that has hit me from behind. It’s the small indignities, like walking in the woods and suddenly needing to pee, more urgently with every step—despite having done so just 20 minutes earlier—and praying that no curious hikers will trail blaze in the thicket where I relieve myself; it is having to ask my children the same question repeatedly, within a span of minutes; or forgetting the name of the neighbor who greets me on the street. It is recurrently enjoying the same movie for the first time.

Then there's sex. When F. and I began 20 years ago, it seemed inconceivable that my appetite would ever wane. Don’t get me wrong: My man still curls my toes. But we've slowed down. And nighttime, which once felt like the most delicious time to get steamed up under the covers has switched to weekend afternoons, before tiredness settles back into our bones and it is easier to clear the physiological hurdles that get steeper with fatigue.

Finally, there's career.

I'd expected to be nestled in a job by now, headed toward retirement; not on the loose, a dinosaur in the current job market, where social media skills, willingness to work around the clock and being (or looking) 30 or younger are what’s most valuable.

By the sound of things, you might not know that age has an up side.

Stay tuned.